


In the Dark

by ivor_seghers



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 06:39:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14231496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivor_seghers/pseuds/ivor_seghers
Summary: The fic is based on the first season of the show, further developments are not taken into account.Established relationship is implied.The poem quoted is by W.H. Auden.





	In the Dark

*  
"I am going to the conference, to present a paper on the statistics of delusional criminals' vocabulary," said Dr. Spencer Reid to special agent Aaron Hotchner. "I will be away for the weekend, 25th and 26th, in two weeks' time. I have sent you the link to their site. Ah, and of course, to participate, you don't need to present anything, just pay the registration fee by Friday. I have booked a hotel suite. So if you think of coming, be my guest."

Doctor Reid said it all very quickly, looking directly into Hotchner's eyes. Only in the end of the last sentence did he blink and lower his gaze, as if to mark the end of the conversation. 

Making a short trip to the Criminal justice psychology conference in Ottawa was routine for people like Dr. S. Reid or Jason Gideon. They were scientists and single. Seizing the opportunity to go on quite a short notice was not such an obvious reaction for Hotchner, unit chief and family man. As far as the work was concerned, he could afford a weekend away. With his family, it was another matter altogether. 

He guiltily hugged his blonde and pale wife. Haley gasped and pushed him away. "Have you smoked?" At Aarons' bewildered denial, she only snorted. "Somebody in your office must have, then. Go and change, the odor makes me sick." Hotchner shrugged and obeyed. There was not a single smoker in the BAU.

Aaron began to talk about the conference with infinite caution. If Haley objects, he won't go. But Haley, unexpectedly, did not make any fuss. "You need it for your work. Go on." He looked at her warily. She gave him a gentle absent-minded smile. 

With Haley, Aaron he felt, he was treading on thin ice. The ice had the color of her gray-blue eyes. She was quite a withdrawn person. It was normally difficult to tell what she was thinking about, often until too late. Now she was visibly thinking hard about something. 

Earlier, she had attached an unexpected importance to his injury. "You might have died," she uttered slowly, as if wondering. He braced himself against a cold splash of reproach which her even tone augured. They never came. Haley has not talked again about her returning to work, which had seemed premature to her husband. She has never mentioned divorce again, either. The word, however, once spoken, hung silently about the house like an interrogation mark in comic strips, or stale cigarettes smoke. Aaron did not care to break the silence: it would, he felt, make too ugly a noise, fracturing itself to pieces.

In the plane, Reid sat with his arms tightly crossed across his chest, looking ill at ease. Hotchner met his steady gaze. "Still afraid of flying?" he asked.  
"Like 15% of the flight-fearers, I can't bring myself to believe that this thing," Reid lifted his chin indicating the surroundings, "actually can fly. It is an erroneous belief that is, of course, profoundly irrational but is frequently rationalized as fear of losing control or fear of closed space. If we look at the symbolic meaning of the flight, as early as in 'Traumdeutung' or in Jung's archetypal theory we will find absence of attachments, solitude, void, on the one hand, and growth, independency, and, er, sexual arousal, on the other."  
"What about you?"  
"In my case, claustrophobia can be ruled out."

Sitting in the conference hall and listening to Reid's report, Hotchner noticed that it went well over many a nodding, yawning head. He too had some difficulty to follow. Reid chirped on, undaunted. Decimals and percentages flowed unimpeded from his unfathomable memory. Either his head was bigger on the inside than on the outside, or it withstood the inner pressure of several atmospheres. Hotchner hoped for the first alternative.

*  
There they were, at about ten in the evening, agent Hotchner and Doctor Spencer Reid, far away from home and work, all the night in a hotel before the two of them.

They stood on the balcony of the suite. The city was growling sleepily far beneath. It was getting dark. They lingered, wasting the time that would later seem so precious. Seconds ticked away almost audibly. Aaron wondered detachedly, whether he would count every moment missed as obsessively as he did when thinking about their last night. Just now the steady efforts made to take the opportunity and get together seemed pointless. He did not know how to tell Reid about his sudden apathy, nor how to hide it. 

"The thing is," said Reid who was never afraid to hurt anyone's feelings, "I don't know what is happening to us. What it is, what it was." He spoke a lot slower now when he was neither quoting nor using scientific terms.

His colleague took a long relieved breath. "I don't know either," he admitted.

They leaned tiredly on each other. They felt free to make love, not to, to forget all about it and go on as if nothing happened. For no reason at all, Hotchner felt as if he had all the time in the world ahead of him.

Reid sniffed, his nose cold against the older man's jaw.

As if by tacit accord, BAU field agents never used perfume. The existence of unsubs able to detect a foreign presence on a whiff of "Hugo Boss" remained yet unproved, but nobody was willing to experiment.

"What is it?" asked Hotchner, on his guard. Being sniffed at, hours after the morning shower, seemed vaguely improper. All the same, he rubbed his cheek against Reid's soft and lank hair that smelled like library dust.  
"I can't tell," replied Reid thoughtfully. "It seems like sandalwood."  
"What?"  
"Santalum album, a small tropical tree used for wood and oil in Indian religious practices, and in perfumery, as a source of essential oils." He sniffed jaw line to ear, touching the skin only with his attentive breath. "Your aftershave may include it as one of its ingredients," he concluded.

Hotchner stood speechless, bathing in fathomless bliss. The sheer absurdity of all that Reid said and did made him forget everything. All that he had to keep in mind continuously, as leader of the team and head of the family: relationships, expectations, personal obligations, paragraphs of laws, cases and precedents, disappeared in a silent supernova-like flash, leaving him in the darkness of cool, inhuman, boundless freedom. He breathed in the night air, deeply and with relish.  
"I don't know what is going on, either," he said. "But it is what I need."

Reid's long fingers felt heavenly cool to his feverish temple, then slid through his hair.  
"You are such a mystery to me."  
"What?" Aaron noticed that his replies lacked wit and variety, and did not care.  
"A mystery: a thing I can never learn." Doctor Spencer Reid gave a laxer definition than usual.  
"A person you can never understand?"  
"By learning about things, I have always been able to get around not understanding them. Until now. Now I am… In the dark."

He hid his face, pressing it in his lover's neck, tugging carelessly at his tie, opening the shirt collar. Reid's night was hot, close, and fragrant. Hotchner stared ahead, as if he saw the night for the first time: boundless and blue, cool and airy. It was getting dark. 

*  
Hotchner sat on the bed leaning heavily forward, his elbows on the knees. For a while he listened to the silence, then to the shower splashing. The walls around slowly melted in the dusk; the blue color of the carpet merged with the blackness of the now deep night. 

He got up, undressed, knocked, waited for an answer, then entered the bathroom. Reid stood in the shower slouching, letting the water fall on his white, brittle-looking neck vertebrae. Hotchner slid the plastic door aside and got a lungful of hot vapor.

"Hey! Boiling alive?" He stepped in, determined to prevent his younger co-worker's brutal untimely death.

"I'll wash you, okay?" Reid asked. He did so, reverently and meticulously, as if his lover was made of eighteenth century bone china, although the notions of bones, jutting, and porcelain skin applied much better to himself. It seemed the mere notion of shame was foreign to him. On the other hand, the other long-fingered hand that seized his shoulder to turn him around, Hotchner had no doubt that Spencer Reid, doctor of psychology, could discourse at length about a multitude of its definitions and characteristics. 

Shame, to one experiencing it, was scarlet inside the closed eyelids, shuttering away the whiteness of tiles and foam, giving a torture-like edge to Reid's movements, cautious but precise. Reid seemed to be as calm and in control when giving pleasure, as he looked vulnerable and bewildered when accepting it. His lover threw his head back and hissed drawing in the air through clenched teeth.

"Have you said anything?" Reid asked some minutes later.  
"It doesn't matter."  
"I just thought you had. Er… I thought that was what I was doing, so I… paid no heed."  
Slowly, Hotchner opened his eyes and turned to face Reid who was washing himself again.  
"You okay?" Reid asked anxiously."  
"I'm fine. Let's go to bed before you develop gills."

"Spencer…"  
"Ouch. Can you just call me Reid."  
"Have you ever slept with a girl?"  
Reid grunted annoyedly.  
"I have tried to sleep with a girl once. I liked her. I was not drunk. Nothing happened. I mean nothing along the lines of what we've just… Perpetrated."  
The last word touched Aaron with double soft breath. They were equal in height but in the bed Reid moved so that he could bury his face in Hotchner's neck again, and now spoke against his breast. Spencer who seemed thin as a sheet of paper in appearance, felt unexpectedly heavy and massive when hugged: a ton of bones, sharp angles and hard planes desperately trying to drape themselves around Aaron like a grapevine.  
"What did she say?"  
"Some things she meant as offences."  
"How old were you?"  
"Seventeen. Later I've liked plenty of people in the MIT, and later in the BAU: virtually the whole team. That is why I never shake hands with anyone. Afraid of them guessing on the touch. Of me not being able to concentrate. Of being laughed at. It goes against professional ethics, against all ethics actually, to like so many people at once, all in the wrong way.  
Now it is easier to pretend that nothing happens: I'm not touching anybody, you included. At work."  
Aaron moved his fingers caught in Reid's damp hair. The young man's grip relaxed as he drifted to sleep. But he immediately jerked awake and hugged him as if afraid to loose him, or even a second of their being together. Hotchner stroked his back: vertebrae, shoulder blade, ribs.

"Wystan Hugh Auden said," Reid murmured unexpectedly:

"Lay your sleeping head, my love,  
Human on my faithless arm;  
Time and fevers burn away  
Individual beauty from  
Thoughtful children, and the grave  
Proves the child ephemeral:  
But in my arms till break of day  
Let the living creature lie,  
Mortal, guilty, but to me  
The entirely beautiful."

Hotchner dozed off to the monotonous lullaby. 

He awoke to the early morning light. He moved his hand to stroke Reid's bare white shoulder, cold and hard as if he had been sleeping with a marble statue. Now he could not bear to think of parting. 

*  
Haley met him at the door. She wore a soft, grey-blue, very becoming, cashmere sweater. The house was quiet; Jack was asleep. Haley appeared flustered; as Aaron gradually noticed, it was not just a projection of his guilty conscience. She avoided sitting down on the black leather couch beside him, but rushed about the immaculate hall, adding a candle to ones that already glimmered on the shining tabletop; bringing a bottle of brandy and pouring her astonished husband half a glass, darting away again to fuss unnecessarily with the curtain and ask, as if on afterthought: "How was the conference?" 

"What are we celebrating?"

The questions shot out simultaneously and collided. A short silence ensued. Haley broke it, softly but deliberately: "Hey, I've got something to show you."

She sat down at last and smiled nervously. Aaron moved to put his hand around her shoulders but she sidled away, holding out a white plastic strip. He took it. A pregnancy test, positive. He gasped, paled, calculated. Just over two months had passed after Haley mentioned divorce.  
Two months, since the night when she felt cold and woke him up, at least partially.

"But… You were breastfeeding. You have not got your period back to normal yet," he stammered, completely at a loss. They had certainly not planned to have another child so soon. Hotchner remembered very well the words his wife gasped between the contractions: "Never again." He had secretly hoped he could persuade her some years later. 

She met his gaze and smiled. It was not a tight little smile that promised a series of well-founded reproaches. Haley looked obviously, unexpectedly, uncharacteristically happy.

"It is as if I've got to keep a piece of you, all to myself, forever," she said, clutching the white strip to her heart.


End file.
